E.H. Gombrich's Little History of the World
World Historians Rarely Write Books Fit For Children's Literature
May 15, 2009
Ernst H. Gombrich was an unemployed Viennese academic in 1935. His first job was as an English- to-German translator doing a series on Knowledge For Children. He suggested that he could write a better book than the one he was translating and his publisher dared him to write a chapter. As they say, the rest was history.
E.H. Gombrich and The Writing of World History
Gombrich lived in interesting times when Austria's neighbour, Germany was accepting Hitler and Nazism. Already by1936, he and his wife had moved to England. As a British citizen, he went on to have a brilliant career at London University, win several important academic prizes, as well as being knighted in 1972. As he recounted, he had lived in what eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm called the Age of Extremes, 1914-1991. His challenge was to not only explain his own age but all the world's civilizations and to do it, as he said in his preface (p. xvi) with a belief "that it should be perfectly possible to explain most things to an intelligent child without jargon or pompous language."
With a discipline that would have made the meticulous historian Pliny the Elder proud, Gombrich, in quick succession
- plotted out the book by selecting the ages and civilizations that touched most people and were easily remembered
- researched diligently during the day
- in the evening he would write a chapter, forty of them
- for feedback, he read the chapters aloud to make sure it flowed and was understood.
The result, A Little History Of the World, was successful at first, being translated into five languages until the Nazis stopped print, claiming it was too pacifist. In 1960, a second German edition appeared and the book was translated into 18 languages. For the English editon (Yale University Press, 2005), Gombrich added a chapter and discussed some corrections to his historiography; namely
- how he changed his views on Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points under the warning not to believe everything you read in newspapers
- the toning down of optimism, Enlightenment and the truly, less brutal new age because of World War II and the Holocaust. His simple style and honest treatment comes forth. "Schoolchildren are often intolerant....Unfortunately grown-ups don't behave any better" (pp. 276-277).
A Little History of the World As Children's Literature
The genre of world history is usually represented by tomes describing rises and falls of civilizations, like Oswald Spengler's two volume Decline of the West and Perspectives of World History or Arnold J. Toynbee's 12 volumes of A Study of History, which took almost 30 years to write. Gombrich didn't want to replace those works necessarily but he did want to make history important and readable to everyone.
His history book wasn't without criticism. In her article, "A Little History is A Dangerous Thing", Ann Talbot rebutted a claim in the Financial Times by Andrew Roberts that the book was Marxist. How could he, after all, rebuke a book that begins with "once upon a time"?
But the acclaim was overwhelming on its suitability for kids (and adults). Gombrich engages and does not condescend.
- He uses metaphors to illustrate. For instance he asks if you have ever heard far off thunder and wondered when the storm would come and says the end of the Roman Empire was like that (p. 105)
- As a way of explaining a re-thinking of the Dark Ages he says it was more like a starry night, not completely dark (p. 111)
- He uses humour to defuse some horror such as defenestration in Prague in 1618. "They landed in a pile of manure, and so came to little harm, (p. 193). So begins his account of the Thirty Years War in his chapter, "Terrible Times".
Gombrich died in 2001 but not before he left a legacy that showed we could all understand the great issues of our times. As Ann Talbot concluded, "A great part of the appeal of the book is that its intimate, conversational style makes reading it rather like being told stories by a favourite grandfather."
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